Borough amends tax timeliness code

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly approved an ordinance codifying postmarks as an acceptable means for proving that taxes have been paid on time as well as an agreement with the Willow Area Community Organization at their meeting on June 1.

Ordinance 21-047 standardized rules of timeliness, proof, and presumption regarding tax payments and passed the Assembly unanimously.

“The borough currently has no rules in code regarding when a tax payment is timely, what you can use to show your tax payment is timely and what you can’t use to show that the borough should’ve received it and it wasn’t your fault that the borough didn’t. So this ordinance clarifies what those rules are and puts them into code and makes them apply to all taxes unless that specific tax has a different rule and right now the only one that has a different rule in it is the Talkeetna sewer and water sales tax,” said Mat-Su Borough Attorney Nick Spiropolous. “This will allow postmark or use of private delivery service to qualify as timeliness, as being timely because there’s a U.S. Supreme Court case from 1916 that says something’s only timely filed when it’s received and so we’re codifying a rule here that says postmarks can be used and that if you use certified or private courier and you have a receipt, it is presumed that the borough got it.”

Spiropolous said that the ordinance came from a complaint from a resident at an Assembly meeting and was put into action. Ordinance 21-046 extended a management agreement with the Borough and WACO and also passed the Assembly unanimously.

“The management agreement between the borough and WACO is due this year. Beings how the library is being rebuilt and WACO has no access to the community center building which is part of the project, we just want to extend the management agreement for a year. We’re absorbing a bit more of the costs because they technically can’t even use their building and that’s what this does,” said Community Development Director Eric Phillips.

The Assembly also approved extending the deadline to a previously completed project to allow for funds to carry over for maintenance on the roof of the Dorothy Swanda Jones borough building.

“What this does is takes project funds that are for projects that are complete that are for building maintenance and allows us to re appropriate those to do a roof replacement for a segment of this building where the roof is leaking into our network operations center over thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment and so what we’re doing is looking for an opportunity to repurpose that funding for additional building maintenance in this building as opposed to the fireweed building because that work has been completed,” said Borough Manager Mike Brown.

The Assembly will meet next on June 15 for a special meeting at 4 p.m., and a regular meeting at 6 p.m. at the borough building.